Posts Tagged ‘ground zero

First of all I’d like to give a shout out to the lovely MEEN- educator, artist, academic and maker of awesome things- of Meening of Life.

Also, have you heard of Slinkachu’s Little People Project? It’s a long-running street art project exploring the tiny intricacies of the urban landscape with , well, tiny people. Recently he’s added to his oeuvre with a miniature Ground Zero Mosque not too far from the actual one…which simply has to be seen.

Ex-CTV bureau chief Kai Nagata has not only quit his job but put forth a fairly scathing manifesto on the sorry state of Canadian journalism up on , which I encourage all of you to read…
Some choice points:
“There are also watchdogs with varying degrees of clout. But these entities have no enforcement capacity. Underneath this lies the fact that information is a commodity, and private TV networks are supposed to make money. All stations, publicly funded or not, want to maintain or expand their viewership. This is what I’ll call the elephant in the room…
Aside from being overrun by “Action News” prophets from Iowa, the CBC has another problem: the perception that it’s somehow a haven for left-wing subversives. True or not, the CBC was worried enough about its pinko problem to commission an independent audit of its coverage, in which more consultants tried to quantify “left-wing bias” and, presumably using stopwatches, demonstrate that the CBC gives the Conservative government airtime commensurate with the proportion of seats it holds in the House of Commons. Or something like that…
On climate change, the conclusion I am forced to draw is that the current federal government has completely abdicated its responsibility. The message to my generation is: figure it out yourselves. The dogmatic refusal to accept that people have created this crisis and people must do what they can to avert it reminds me of the flat-earth crew. Except this time, we really are going to sail off the edge…”

The endless repetition of charges of “Liberal Media Bias” by a monstrous American right-wing media bloc (a tactic which falls in well with Noam Chomsky’s observation that today’s media discourse is based on bombarding the markets with a statement until enough people believe it’s true) is starting to trickle north, and while I don’t think we have much to fear from Sun News now (Ezra Levant is a laughably pale clown hopelessly imitating things he’s seen Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly do in the hopes that he’ll get the same reaction…if a man has to break out the Muhammad Cartoons in 2011 as part of his schtick then there’s really no hope for him as a shock jock.) the desire to respond to these charges can clearly be seen in the actions of the CBC. How else can one explain Kevin (I’m not a real venture capitalist but I play one on TV) O’Leary getting his own political analysis show? Here’s a man who made money repackaging freeware for sale and has been accused of shady business practices by more than one group of shareholders. Well, I guess that sort of behaviour’s kinda par for the business class these days.

Don’t get me started on the latest election either. Our media outlets were content to let Stephen Harper endlessly repeat “But that’s simply not true” without calling him out on anything or forcing him to check his facts. What happened to the journos who ran Stockwell Day out of the room when he tried to insist that the Census figures on crime were rubbish? They chafed under Harper’s “5 questions a day and only the ones I want to answer” policy, but not a single news station made a big deal out of it?